Primary Matter. The Technical Nature of Wood in Ancient Thought

Abstract

The essay reconstructs the origins of the concept of matter in the Greek and Latin traditions from its archaic use to its use in literary and philosophical works to show how this concept was born linked to the experience of the technical manipulation of plant materials, in particular wood. The aim of the essay is to evaluate, on this basis, the hypothesis of a technical-vegetal derivation of the primary ontological structures and cognitive repertoire of the human being. From the archaic Greek philosophical tradition through the thought of the great systematizers Plato and Aristotle to arrive at the most important representatives of the Latin tradition (Cicero, Lucretius, Seneca, Calcidius, Isidore of Seville) up to the threshold of contemporary anthropology, the essay reconstructs the more important stages in the evolution of humanity’s first true “companion species”.